Notes from the Labyrinthhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/
Notes from the Labyrinth - LiveJournal.comSat, 28 Feb 2015 16:42:16 GMTLiveJournal / LiveJournal.comtruepenny818252personalhttp://l-userpic.livejournal.com/29592853/818252Notes from the Labyrinthhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/
100100http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884631.htmlSat, 28 Feb 2015 16:42:16 GMTNebula Awards Weekendhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/884631.html
So, yes, I will be attending the <a href="http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-awards/nebula-weekend/">Nebula Awards Weekend</a> this year. I will be attending as Katherine Addison, given that Katherine Addison is the one nominated for the award, not Sarah Monette.<br /><br />As you might expect, this is a rather peculiar feeling.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884631.htmlkatherine addisongoblin emperorshiny gold starsjekyll and hydepublic6http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884282.htmlSat, 21 Feb 2015 19:50:11 GMTUBC: Chisholm, DiGrazia, and Yost, The News from Whitechapelhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/884282.html
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1242522.The_News_From_Whitechapel" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The News From Whitechapel: Jack The Ripper In The Daily Telegraph" border="0" src="https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348065400m/1242522.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1242522.The_News_From_Whitechapel">The News From Whitechapel: Jack The Ripper In The Daily Telegraph</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5319179.Alexander_Chisholm">Alexander Chisholm</a><br /><br />My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1186188129">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><br />This book is for you if you want primary sources and you are either:<br><br>(A) interested in Jack the Ripper<br>(B) interested in Victorian journalism.<br><br>Otherwise, this book is probably NOT for you, since it is a compilation of <em>The Daily Telegraph</em>'s coverage of the five canonical murders of Jack the Ripper (Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, Kelly). The editors have included commentaries about each murder, which I found to be little more than a distraction, but might be helpful for someone just getting their feet wet in Ripperology.<br><br>I gave this book five stars because it is an <em>AWESOME</em> primary source for both Jack the Ripper and late-Victorian journalism and I deeply appreciate the work the editors did to put it together, but this is very much a YMMV kind of review. If you aren't the target audience in a very small niche market, it's probably not going to be your cup of tea.<br><br>I loved it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36603555-katherine-addison">View all my reviews</a>http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884282.htmlwhitechapel 1888unread book challengepublic2http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884068.htmlFri, 20 Feb 2015 19:11:18 GMTNebulas (Nebulae?)http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884068.html
The <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2015/02/announcing-the-2014-nebula-awards-nominees">Nebula nominees</a> for 2014 have been announced.<br /><br /><em>The Goblin Emperor</em> is one of the nominees for Best Novel (!!!!!).<br /><br />Congratulations to everyone on the list!http://truepenny.livejournal.com/884068.htmlkatherine addisongoblin emperorshiny gold starspublic33http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883796.htmlSat, 07 Feb 2015 17:38:24 GMTCool news & Buy Read Talk Reduxhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/883796.html
<em>The Goblin Emperor</em> is the ALA's best Fantasy for Adult Readers on their <a href="http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2015/02/2015-reading-list-announced-year-s-best-genre-fiction-adult-readers">2015 genre fiction reading list</a>.<br /><br />This seems like a good time to link back (once again) to my <a href="http://truepenny.livejournal.com/865424.html">Buy, Read, Talk</a> post, because it bears repeating: if you want to support an author whose work you love, buy the book--or ask your library to buy the book, that's equally awesome--and <em>tell people about it</em>. I'm not talking specifically about me here (though obviously I'm not gonna say no), but about <em>any</em> author; this is the most widely applicable piece of advice I think I've ever given.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883796.htmlwhat i tell you 3 times is truekatherine addisonbuy read talkgoblin emperorshiny gold starspreaching to the choirpublic4http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883655.htmlSat, 31 Jan 2015 17:00:48 GMTUBC: Lambert, The Gates of Hellhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/883655.html
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10286752-the-gates-of-hell" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin&amp;quot;s Tragic Quest for the North West Passage" border="0" src="https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328848098m/10286752.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10286752-the-gates-of-hell">The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/511568.Andrew_Lambert">Andrew Lambert</a><br /><br />My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1123375222">1 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><br />Lambert wants to prove that Sir John Franklin was neither weak nor indecisive nor a poor leader. Unfortunately, every time he put forward evidence of same, to me, it looked like evidence that Franklin was exactly the things Lambert was trying to prove he wasn't: weak, indecisive, and a very poor leader, especially in a crisis.<br><br>Also, this book is <em>not</em> about "Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage." For one thing, part of Lambert's thesis is that Franklin didn't set off into the Arctic to discover the Northwest Passage at all, that he was collecting geomagnetic readings--if he was trying to find anything or reach anything, it was the magnetic north pole. But more importantly, this book isn't really about Franklin's last voyage. It's about Franklin's career beforehand, and about the search for Franklin afterwards--and decidedly about the scientific obsessions of the day--but there's almost no discussion of the voyage of the <em>Erebus</em> and the <em>Terror</em> and what happened to their crews. Since--carrion crow that I am--I was looking for a book about the catastrophe of 1845, I was disappointed that the title of the book and the content of the book did not match very well.<br><br>But I wouldn't even have minded that if the book had been a better book. I found Lambert to be a poor historian: e.g., after quoting at length Thomas Arnold's horrific letter to Franklin about Franklin's appointment as governor of Van Diemen's Land: "If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen; and that, even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all the offices of honour or authority in the colony" (95), Lambert, while asserting that "Arnold's potent mix of evangelical faith and moral purpose would be the key to Franklin's government" (95), entirely fails to mention whether Franklin <em>agreed</em> with him about the inheritable nature of iniquity or whether the ideas in this letter had any discernible influence on how he governed. And, honestly, I am going to regard with skepticism any historian of nineteenth century British naval history who can write the sentence, "For a man of faith, used to the honest, open and frank world of naval service where the national good outweighed personal ambition, the experience [of governing Van Diemen's Land] was traumatic" (137)--especially given how the behavior of many of the naval officers in this book blatantly demonstrates its falsity.<br><br>Although I grant that there's nothing he can do about the overwhelmingly masculine nature of his subject matter, I was annoyed by his treatment of Jane Franklin, whom he called variously "Jane," "Lady Franklin," and "Lady Jane"--while never taking the liberty of calling her husband just plain "John." It's a small point, but indicative of the potential for much larger problems. He was also utterly uninterested in anyone who was not a commissioned officer, which replicates the social biases of his subject rather than examining them.<br><br>Ultimately, I found this book frustrating. Lambert is trying to exculpate Sir John Franklin from the judgment history has made of him, and he has written a poor work of history in the (failed) attempt.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36603555-katherine-addison">View all my reviews</a>http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883655.htmlunread book challengepublic2http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883237.htmlWed, 21 Jan 2015 21:41:59 GMTIf you're thinking about such thingshttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/883237.html
<em>The Goblin Emperor</em> is eligible for awards this year. That's all I'm going to say on the subject.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/883237.htmlgoblin emperorshiny gold starspublic8http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882981.htmlSun, 04 Jan 2015 16:03:11 GMTKasserman, Fall River Outragehttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/882981.html
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3491915-fall-river-outrage" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England" border="0" src="https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-c93ac9cca649f584bf7c2539d88327a8.png" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3491915-fall-river-outrage">Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/639337.David_Richard_Kasserman">David Richard Kasserman</a><br /><br />My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1108689310">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><br />It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is <em>The Murder of Helen Jewett</em> by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about <em>Fall River Outrage</em> is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.<br><br>I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is <em>not</em> good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)<br><br>Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend <em>Fall River Outrage</em>, that's what I'm recommending it for.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36603555-katherine-addison">View all my reviews</a>http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882981.htmlfall river 1832unread book challengepublic3http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882874.htmlThu, 27 Nov 2014 18:54:40 GMT3:10 to Yumahttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/882874.html
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050086/?ref_=nv_sr_2"><em>3:10 to Yuma</em></a> (1957), dir. Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin<br /><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381849/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><em>3:10 to Yuma</em></a> (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale<br /><br />This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.<br /><br /><br />The basic story behind <em>3:10 to Yuma</em> poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:<br /><br />(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.<br /><br />(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, <em>without changing his fundamental nature</em>, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.<br /><br />Essentially, Ben Wade puts <em>himself</em> on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.<br /><br />What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, <em>oh shit what if they don't GET it?</em> and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it <em>isn't necessary</em>, because Russell Crowe has <em>handled</em> it. Russell Crowe has <em>shown</em> us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.<br /><br />(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie <em>before</em> we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)<br /><br />In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044706/?ref_=nv_sr_1">High Noon</em></a>, is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we <em>like</em> any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about <em>3:10 to Yuma</em>: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.<br /><br />(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)<br /><br />The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is <em>focused</em> in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle <em>focused</em>, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.<br /><br />This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.<br /><br />Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--<br /><br />I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:<br /><blockquote>WADE: They're gonna kill you and your father, William. They're gonna laugh while they do it. I think you know that.<br />WILL: Call 'em off.<br />WADE: Why should I?<br />WILL: Because you're not all bad.<br />WADE: Yes, I am.<br />WILL: You saved us from those Indians.<br />WADE: I saved myself.<br />WILL: You got us through the tunnels. You helped us get away.<br />WADE: If I had a gun in them tunnels, I would have used it on you.<br />WILL: I don't believe you.<br />WADE: Kid, I wouldn't last five minutes leading an outfit like that if I wasn't as rotten as hell.</blockquote><br />and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.<br /><br />--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade <em>does</em> save them from the Apaches; he <em>is</em> capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.<br /><br />One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we <em>want</em> him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.<br /><br />But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker <em>is</em> real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.<br /><br />And Wade is not sorry.<br /><br />Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto <em>Pilgrim's Progress</em>, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about <em>Will</em> (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene make a little more sense.<br /><br />Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.<br /><br />---<br />*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882874.htmlstorytelling3:10 to yumapublic2http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882647.htmlMon, 24 Nov 2014 20:13:46 GMTThe Goblin Emperor: typos?http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882647.html
I have the proofs for the mass market paperback of <em>The Goblin Emperor</em>. If you have noticed any typos in the hardback, now would be an absolutely SPLENDID time to let me know about them, since I need to turn my corrections in by December 2nd.<br /><br />Blessings upon all your heads.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882647.htmlgoblin emperorpublic25http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882197.htmlSat, 22 Nov 2014 16:18:44 GMTUBC: Loerzel, Alchemy of Boneshttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/882197.html
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1269771.Alchemy_of_Bones" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Alchemy of Bones: Chicago&amp;quot;s Luetgert Murder Case of 1897" border="0" src="https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328871940m/1269771.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1269771.Alchemy_of_Bones">Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/611498.Robert_Loerzel">Robert Loerzel</a><br /><br />My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1102796722">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><br />This is an excellent recounting of a very complicated piece of history: the disappearance of Louise Luetgert on May 1-2 1897, and the investigation, indictment, 2 trials, conviction, and imprisonment of her husband, Adolph Louis Luetgert, for murdering her and then dissolving her body in the basement of his sausage works. Loerzel does a great job with his sources, especially the newspapers (I was dubious at first about all the newspaper drawings he'd included, but he was right to do so; they convey something important that doesn't go easily into words), and he tells the labyrinthine progress of the trials clearly and impartially, without favoring either side. He points out the way that neither prosecution nor defense could put forward a story that didn't have holes and contradictions in it, and he draws the inevitable conclusion: from this distance (and with all of the evidence from the trials having vanished in the intervening century plus), we can't determine whether Luetgert was guilty or innocent, but it is painfully easy to see that he didn't get a fair trial.<br><br>(A point that nobody seems to have made, but that is a big stumbling block for me: if Luetgert was innocent, then when Louise Luetgert randomly picked her moment to go crazy and flee into the night, it JUST HAPPENED to be the same night that her husband chose to experiment with making soft soap in the basement of his sausage works, which he'd never done before, AND decided to move the furniture around so his fox terrier could hunt rats, AND sent the night watchman out on two nearly pointless errands, AND, AND, AND . . . The coincidences just have to keep mounting up to make Luetgert's story true.<br><br>(Also, the testimony that I found absolutely compelling, and chillingly gruesome, was that of the two workmen who were told to clean up the basement the next morning. They weren't making those details up.)<br><br>Luetgert died in Joliet while his attorney was still working on an appeal, so there's no resolution to the story, no final satisfying judgment. Hung jury in his first trial, obvious mistrial in his second trial. I ended up agreeing with Clarence Darrow: "I really believe that he was guilty but that he was convicted on insufficient evidence" (277).<br><br>Truth stranger than fiction: Luetgert's sausage works are now loft condominiums.<br><br>For more, check out Loerzel's website <a href="http://alchemyofbones.com" rel="nofollow">alchemyofbones.com</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36603555-katherine-addison">View all my reviews</a>http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882197.htmlchicago 1897unread book challengepublic4http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882082.htmlThu, 20 Nov 2014 19:40:56 GMTRequiem for Preyhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/882082.html
<center>REQUIEM FOR PREY<br />by Sarah Monette</center><br /><br />Prey use the word "love" like it means something.<br /><br />He said he loved me. He asked if I loved him, too. I said I did, because I didn't want to argue. I just wanted to fuck.<br /><br />I pay for a mass for the dead because I don't know what else to do.<br /><br />I stand in the back of the church, cold, nervous, smelling fear and incense and mold. The priests are trying not to look at me. It's just me and them and two old, old ladies up in front.<br /><br />I told them to say the mass in Latin.<br /><br />They looked at me, the old priest and the young priest. <em>Do you know Latin?<br /><br />It doesn't matter. I'm not Catholic.</em><br /><br />And they leaned away from my smile, like prey always do.<br /><br />But they took my money.<br /><br />It's not like he knew Latin, either, but a mass for the dead should be in a dead language. It's not the words that matter.<br /><br />I'm sorry that he's dead. I can still smell him on me, and I want to get rid of the scent of prey, but I'm going to wait until the mass is done.<br /><br />Ritual matters.<br /><br />Death matters.<br /><br />Love matters, but not like he thought.<br /><br />I don't know who got him. It might have been me.<br /><br />They'll find the body in a month or a week. He'll be called John Doe in the morgue. His face will be gone, and his fingers. Maybe somebody will pay to bury him. Maybe they won't. Maybe somebody out there wonders where he is.<br /><br />He said he didn't have a family. I said I didn't have a family, either. I lied. My family sings with me in the night, blood on our tongues and teeth, blood staining our fur. That's love. Not words.<br /><br />Prey don't understand that. Dead languages, dead senses, dead bodies, dead masses. It's no wonder they die so feebly.<br /><br />The mass ends and I slip out.<br /><br />The sun's going down.<br /><br />The air smells of rain and cars. And prey.<br /><br /><hr /><hr /><br /><small>(This is an old, old piece. An alert and thoughtful reader let me know the link to it was dead. This was the easiest fix.</small>)http://truepenny.livejournal.com/882082.htmlrequiem for preypublic2http://truepenny.livejournal.com/881717.htmlMon, 10 Nov 2014 22:41:46 GMThttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/881717.html
<em>The Goblin Emperor</em> has made it to the semifinals of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2014">Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fantasy</a>. (!!!)<br /><br />Also, I have turned on the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6949698.Katherine_Addison?from_search=true">Ask the Author thing on the Author Profile page</a>, so if you want to ask a question about <em>The Goblin Emperor</em>, click and ask, and I'll do my best.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/881717.htmlkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic10http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880643.htmlFri, 20 Jun 2014 12:25:55 GMTAudio book!http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880643.html
<em>The Goblin Emperor</em> is now <a href="https://www.tantor.com/BookDetail.asp?Product=F0277_GoblinEmperor">available as an audio book</a> from Tantor Audio.<br /><br />(I am SUPER EXCITED. This is the first time any of my books has been made into an audio book, and it's something I've lusted after for years.)<br /><br />Please help spread the word, as I know many people find audio books fit better into their lives than text-on-paper/screen books.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880643.htmlshameless self-promotionaudiokatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic5http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880392.htmlWed, 11 Jun 2014 21:44:50 GMTUBC: Nickelhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/880392.html
Nickel, Steven. <u>Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Pyschopathic Killer</u>. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1989.<br /><hr /><br />About half of what's wrong with this book is that it was written in 1989. So the book that would actually have been extremely interesting, about the ways that racism, classism, and homophobia shaped the police response to, the press response to, the investigation of, and the failure to find the Cleveland Torso Murderer, is not the book that is actually present. (To be fair, I don't know that any of those things <em>is</em> the reason the Cleveland Torso Murderer was never caught. He seems to have been both extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily careful. But even in Nickel's account, I can see prejudice shaping the questions being asked, and if you don't ask the right questions, you are highly unlikely to get the right answers.)<br /><br />The other half of what's wrong with this book is all there in the subtitle. Nickel wants to write a book about Eliot Ness and the Cleveland Torso Murderer, specifically then way that the failure to catch the guy was part of Ness's slow fall from grace. But his own account makes it perfectly clear that that story is nonsense. Ness was barely involved in the hunt (except for, granted, one absolutely absymal clusterfuck), and his fall from grace has everything to do with some very poor life choices on his part. Yes, the raid on the encampment of homeless people that was Ness's best answer to the problem was a PR disaster, but it's not what destroyed his career as Cleveland's Safety Director. (Being the perpetrator in a alcohol-related hit-and-run accident? Yeah, that'd be the kiss of death. And the rest of Ness's downward slide looks to me, from Nickel's sketchy account, like what happens when a guy who's very very good at one thing stops doing it and then just doesn't even know who he is anymore.)<br /><br />Essentially, it's a coincidence that in the years that the Cleveland Torso Murderer was preying on the homeless and destitute in Cleveland the city's Safety Director was a guy who happens to be extremely famous for his campaign against Al Capone. Nickel's efforts to make it look like something more (including the desperate grab at Ness's (equally desperate) claim to have found the murderer, even though he couldn't convict him or arrest him or even, apparently, investigate him--kind of creepily like Sir Robert Anderson's similar claim about Jack the Ripper) would need a lot more research to make them convincing.<br /><br />That's the other problem. This is a dilettante's book. (And, yes, I know. Pot. Kettle.) Compared to something like <em><a href="http://truepenny.livejournal.com/877097.html">And the Dead Shall Rise</em></a> (649 p., 56 double-columned pages of citations, 4 double-columned pages of bibliography) it is painfully obvious how <em>Torso</em> (224 p., no citations, maybe a page and a half of bibliography) is barely even a swipe at the subject--either subject, since this is no more a biography of Eliot Ness than it is a study of the Cleveland Torso Murderer.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880392.htmlcleveland 1935-1938unread book challengepublic0http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880079.htmlSun, 01 Jun 2014 14:02:51 GMTIn memoriam: Jay Lakehttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/880079.html
<a href="http://www.jlake.com/2014/06/01/cancer-the-end-has-come/">Jay Lake, 1964-2014</a><br /><br />I know it's a cliche to quote this poem, but Dylan Thomas was right, goddammit. <a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night">Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.</a><br /><br />Live forever, Jay.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/880079.htmlfuck cancerin memoriam: jay lakejay lakepublic1http://truepenny.livejournal.com/879655.htmlFri, 30 May 2014 21:52:56 GMTthis is the post I was writing in my head at 4 this morning when I should have been asleephttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/879655.html
<br />I watched two movies recently that were worse than they had to be: <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409847/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Cowboys & Aliens</a></em> (2011) and <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458525/?ref_=nv_sr_3z">X-Men Origins: Wolverine</em></a> (2009). There are all kinds of reasons for this (I could write a <em>book</em> on the things that are wrong with <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em>), but there's one that was thrown into sharp relief by a third movie I've watched recently: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044706/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>High Noon</em></a> (1952--that would be the ACTUAL Gary Cooper <em>High Noon</em>, not the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244536/?ref_=nv_sr_3">remake</a> from 2000, which frankly I can't imagine why you'd watch when you've got Gary Cooper and Katy Jurado RIGHT THERE). Because what <em>High Noon</em> does stunningly well, and what both <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em> and <em>Wolverine</em> flounder and fail at, is structure.<br /><br />I never used to understand structure. (I still bitterly remember the only C I've ever gotten on an English paper, which was a paper on the structure of Emerson's "American Scholar." To this day, I have no idea what that structure was or what I was supposed to say about it.) But apparently somewhere along the line, I've picked up at least some opinions about it, and the thing I want to talk about has been nagging me and nagging me to write it down.<br /><br /><em>High Noon</em> is beautifully structured. Every single damn thing in that movie points either forwards or backwards, to something that <em>did</em> happen or something that <em>will</em> happen. (And of course, the clocks, the terrible relentless clocks.) Chekhov's Gun applies with vindictive precision. Nothing is wasted; nothing is thrown in as a set-piece or "comic relief" or any of the other things a movie can stupidly choose to clutter itself up with. And the single point I really want to talk about is that the movie <em>knows where to begin</em>.<br /><br />(I'm going to pretend the hairshirt penance that is the soundtrack and the insipid vacuity of its shockingly successful title song (Oscar for Best Original Song? Seriously?) simply do not exist. I'd actually love to see a version with the music stripped out, because that awful awful song is intrusive like whoa.)<br /><br /><em>High Noon</em> begins with a cowboy waiting for something, him and his horse and a picturesque tree. Turns out he's waiting for his friends, and once they meet up, they ride down to the Hadleyville train station. And only at that point, in the terrified reaction of the station master, do we learn that these three friends (and even more to the point, the man they're waiting for) are the villains. (Given that part of the problem Will Kane is going to face is the waffling of the citizens of Hadleyville about these same villains, the ambiguity in the opening is neither accidental nor inappropriate.) The camera follows the station master as he sneaks out the back and books it hell for leather into town, and then jumps to introduce our hero, Will Kane, just at the moment of his marriage to Amy Fowler and his concommitant resignation as the marshal of Hadleyville. (Not sheriff. Sheriffs are for counties. Marshals are for towns.) Nothing that happens in that wedding scene is accidental or pointless either, because Carl Foreman wrote the damn movie like a perfectly balanced pocketwatch. But the opening draws us in from a romantic view of a cowboy on a ridge to the town of Hadleyville. It makes us work to get our bearings, which, as I said, is thematically like a warning shot fired across our bows. It establishes the threat--Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train, and he's going to be out for blood--and it establishes with beautiful economy both our hero and the ugly bind he's caught in. We learn about the past only in what the characters say to each other (and I love the way that we barely learn anything about the relationship between Kane and Helen Ramirez EXCEPT WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW, which is how it affects them <em>now</em> in this last hour before the train arrives).<br /><br />Okay. Keep that in mind while I turn my attention to the next contestant. <em>Wolverine</em> made a earnest, literal-minded decision to tell an origin story and therefore start at the beginning, with sickly seven-year-old Logan and the first manifestation of his claws. Very traumatic, with shocking revelations and murder and Freudian family romance, blah blah blah, ending with Logan and his half brother Victor racing off into a muddy montage of war after war, to establish that (a) they both apparently stop aging at 40 and (b) Victor's a bit of a psychopath, to go along with the mutant fingernails and genuinely creepy four-legged run. (Of all the things that are wrong with this movie, I should add, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are not among them. Ditto Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan, Kevin Durand, Daniel Henney, and the entirely awesome Will.i.am. Killing off John Wraith was a rookie mistake, guys.) They get recruited in to Stryker's team of mutants, we have a mission to estabilsh everybody's powers, and then Logan gives them a well earned fuck-you-all and walks off to his romantic shack in the Canadian wilderness with his pointless romantic interest. <br /><br />(Kayla and Ella in <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em>, come to think of it, are the only romantic interests I can think of so enduringly, unvanquishably pointless that they have to be killed twice.)<br /><br />Kayla's really only there to be <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge">the Girl in the Refrigerator</a> and motivate Logan's transformation into Wolverine, and it's at this point that the movie actually, FINALLY begins. Everything heretofore, before the push that sets Logan in motion, is backstory. A lot of it we don't need, or would even be better off without. (Frankly, if the movie started cold with the murder of Chris Bradley, aside from being an absolutely classic <em>X-Files</em> teaser, we would be informationally no worse off--and we would benefit from the tension of wondering why Logan has this weird relationship with Victor the psychopath, instead of <em>already knowing</em>.) The <em>only</em> necessary thing all that backstory does is to give us a good look at Wade Wilson, because when he shows up again, we do genuinely need to have met the smartaleck with the swords to understand just how horrible this thing that Stryker has done is. Everything else could be conveyed (as <em>High Noon</em> conveys its backstory) in the dialogue between the characters. And if you <em>have</em> to do flashbacks, it occurred to me that they would actually work brilliantly in REVERSE order, so that the moment you learn what Logan and Victor really mean to each other is paired with the moment when Victor says to Logan, "Nobody gets to kill you but me."<br /><br />The <em>story</em> the movie is telling doesn't begin with child!Logan, so the fact that the movie begins there is one of the reasons the movie doesn't work very well.<br /><br /><em>Cowboys & Aliens</em>, on the other hand, doesn't work at all.<br /><br />The reasons for this are basically endless, but the one I want to focus on is, again, the beginning. And I want to focus on the beginning because in some ways, it's very like the beginning of <em>High Noon</em>: the transition from the man alone in the hills to the town and the lives of its inhabitants. We start with a man in a picturesque landscape. We don't know anything about him--as it turns out, <em>he</em> doesn't know anything about him--except that he's got a weird, obviously not-Earth-made cuff on his wrist that won't come off. And is a weapon. (The damn thing might as well have a label on it reading PLOT DEVICE, honestly.) Lonergan emerges victorious from his encounter with the villainous Claibornes, leaving the bodies of his enemies behind him, and rides down into Absolution, where he encounters the Dolarhydes, father and son, the sheriff (who's probably also actually a marshal), and the rest of the cast of stereotypes who populate the town.<br /><br />And then the aliens attack.<br /><br />Now here's the problem, and why <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em> is wrong, and <em>High Noon</em> is right. Partly it's that <em>High Noon</em> is about the change that Miller, Pierce, and Colby bring with them into the town of Hadleyville. They're the pebble that starts the avalanche. But it's also an even bigger problem. The basic premise of <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em>, to rephrase it, is that the cast of a generic Western find themselves forced to fight for their lives against equally generic aliens. That being the case, there's a serious scale imbalance between the hero and the threat. Whereas Kane is facing men (and his real problem isn't Frank Miller, it's the way that everybody in Hadleyville decides to surrender before Miller even gets there--as he himself says, he beat Miller before, when he had the deputies and posse to back him up), Lonergan is facing capital-A Aliens, and by the time we get to Absolution and the tired character arcs of the people there, <em>we already know that</em>. We have NO REASON to invest in these characters' concerns because we already know that the movie has no investment in them either.<br /><br />Lonergan is a bad viewpoint character to begin the movie with. Sheriff Taggert would be a much better one, because this isn't a movie about the outsider who comes into a community and changes/is changed by it. This is a movie about a community being invaded by outsiders. What we want is to establish the <em>community</em> first, make the audience care about the sheriff and his grandson, the bartender and his Mexican wife (compare her to Helen Ramirez, and a full hand of the <em>other</em> things that are wrong with this movie deal themselves out like magic), the cattle baron and his wastrel son. Give some weight to the Western, to the lives of the people of Absolution. <em>THEN</em> have the bleeding amnesiac stranger come stumbling into town, upsetting everybody's arcs and bringing chaos in his wake. <em>THEN</em> have the aliens attack.<br /><br />Establish the microcosm of Absolution <em>before</em> the reveal of the hostile macrocosm, because otherwise neither side has any weight, and the story becomes a kind of shallow sludge.<br /><br />Again, I compare back to the sharp, relentless precision of <em>High Noon</em>, which is a simple story told in an elegantly complicated way. It's a little overly facile to say that <em>Wolverine</em> and <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em> are complicated stories told in overly simple ways, but it's also not entirely wrong. Certainly, they are stories that would have benefitted from some elegance in their telling.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/879655.htmlanalyze all the things!public9http://truepenny.livejournal.com/879424.htmlThu, 29 May 2014 12:48:29 GMTAn Open Letter to Jay Lakehttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/879424.html
Dear Jay,<br /><br />I hate your cancer with all my heart.<br /><br />We have never been close friends, but I have always liked and admired you, for your kindness; your generosity; your passion; your mindfulness and devotion to your responsibilities as a parent; your sense of humor and your unerring eye for the ridiculous; your unflagging love of our genre; the courage with which you aver your convictions and engage with those who disagree with you; the way that you make rooms brighter and warmer just by being in them.<br /><br />You introduced me to the term "faith-based reasoning," which is such a useful and paradigm-shifting cognitive tool I cannot even tell you.<br /><br />I have the Campbell nomination pin because you decided the Campbell nomination pin should exist and made it be so, and I am grateful.<br /><br />My life is better because I know you.<br /><br />Fuck cancer.<br /><br />Love,<br />Sarahhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/879424.htmlfuck cancerjay lakepublic7http://truepenny.livejournal.com/879202.htmlMon, 26 May 2014 14:07:28 GMTUBC: Bergenhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/879202.html
Bergen, Doris. <u>Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich</u>. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.<br /><hr /><br /><br />So, I have a new theory, which is that the Treaty of Versailles caused a psychotic break in almost the entirety of the "Aryan" population of Germany. Given how egregiously they were being gaslighted by the leaders of the German armed forces, it's not entirely surprisiing. The Nazis didn't <em>cause</em> the psychosis; they were a manifestation of the psychosis--as were the German Christians, the subject of this book. But this psychotic moral reversal, having been encouraged for at least half a century beforehand (Bergen describes one example, the Protestant League, founded in 1887, as "foster[ing] a climate of hatred within German Protestant circles that both encouraged and legitimized collective resentments" (114)), was endemic to "Aryan" German culture in the twenties and thirties. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's <em>Hitler's Willing Executioners</em>, although problematic, I think makes, and hammers home, the point that the dominant culture of Germany was ready to hear what Hitler had to say, because all the pieces of Hitler's ideology were <em>already available to them</em>.<br /><br />(Hitler was <em>stunningly</em> unoriginal; he basically just assembled all the unconnected pieces of hatred, entitlement, and bigotry lying around in "Aryan" German culture in the twenties into something that could be focused, aimed, and deployed for maximum destruction.)<br /><br />In this context "German Christian" ("Deutsche Christen") means a specific movement in the Protestant German church, as opposed to, say, "Christian Germans," meaning everyone of Christian faith living in Germany--or Christians outside Germany who claimed or were claimed to be "ethnically German." (Bergen is one of the few writers on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that I've read who recognizes how dangerous and slippery using the Nazi terminology of race is:<br /><blockquote>Labels are always tricky, but students of Nazi Germany face particular challenges. To describe National Socialism, we depend on the same words and phrases that Nazi propaganda appropriated and infused with particular meanings: words like <em>race, blood, Aryan, German,</em> and <em>Jew</em>.<br />(4)</blockquote><br />It is vanishingly rare to find a historian who acknowledges this problem, and I appreciate it in Bergen as much as I appreciate her careful attention to nuances of meaning in over-determined German words (i.e., <em>Volk</em>).) The German Christians, who described themselves as "storm troopers of Christ," are pretty much exactly what you would imagine if you set out to imagine a way of reconciling Christianity and Nazism. They were anti-doctrinal, anti-clerical, anti-theological, anti-Semitic, misogynist, repellantly proud of their own ignorance, and capable of some of the most incredibly clusterfucked logical fallacies I have had the dubious pleasure of reading. I shall quote an example:<br /><blockquote>Most frequently, German Christians based negation of Jesus's Jewishness on their presumption of his antisemitism. Jesus, they asserted, could not have been a Jew because he opposed the Jews. . . . In late 1933 on German Christian offered citations from the Gospels that, he claimed, revealed Jesus' attitude tward Judaism . . . In places, he admitted, the Gospels seemed to suggest the opposite. But those were not the words of Christ, he contended; they were "lies," "Jewishness," the "voice of the Old Testament."<br />(156)</blockquote><br />The German Christians were fanatically devoted to the idea of making the Protestant Church palatable to National Socialism. They were utterly, <em>utterly</em> doomed to failure, since the Nazi high command was pretty much equally committed to the idea of eradicating Christianity from Germany, which makes Bergen's account of their gyrations and contortions pathetic as well as infuriating. But Bergen's research makes it clear that they also represent a inchoate, badly articulated desire prevalaent among many more Germans than those who joined the mvement, to have their cake and eat it, too: to have the comforting, familiar trappings of the Church, the ritual and sense of community, without any of the uncomfortable rules and restrictions and moral accountability for one's actions. This same desire is visible in many other aspects of interbellum "Aryan" German culture; Bergen has found an articulation of it that is mind-boggling in its on-the-nose, epic failure of self-awareness:<br /><blockquote>In a 1934 declaration, the Protestant faculty of theology in Breslau denounced emphasis on sin as inimical to the needs of the people's church. Blasting Barthian theology, Judaism, and foreign foes in one rancorous breath, the Breslau group announced that Germans could not tolerate a religion based on the concept of sin. "A people," the statement argued, "who, like our own, has a war behind them that they did not want, that they lost, and for which they were declared guilty, cannot bear it, when their sinfulness is constantly pointed out to them in an exaggerated way." The Treaty of Versailles, the Breslauers maintained, made an emphasis on sin untenable. "Our people has suffered so much under the lie of war guilt that it is the task and duty of the church and of theology to use Christianity to give courage to our people, and not to pull them down into political humiliation."<br />(158)</blockquote><br />The German Christians were prepared to mutiliate Christianity, its sacred texts, and everything that makes it a coherent body of thought, in order to make it what they declared the German people wanted.<br /><br />The German Christians are as horrifying and fascinating as the Nazis themselves, and they follow very much the same trajectory, even extending to the aftermath of World War II, in which, just as "de-Nazification" is highly problematic, the German Christian <em>movement</em>, being disbanded, became a convenient scapegoat for the rest of the Christian Germans (the better to distract attention from their own participation in Germany's psychotic break), but the vast majority of <em>individual</em> German Christians, particularly the rank and file, escaped without being held accountable, without any alteration in their thinking, and without remorse.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/879202.htmlnazis: evil *and* crazyunread book challengedystopian nonfictionpublic8http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878910.htmlFri, 23 May 2014 17:51:10 GMTATTENTION WISCON plus BONUS MYSTERY OBJECThttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/878910.html
ATTENTION WISCON: I will be in the dealers' room Saturday, pretty much from 10-6. You can find me behind <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P " lj:user="elisem" ><a href="http://elisem.livejournal.com/profile" target="_self" class="i-ljuser-profile" ><img class="i-ljuser-userhead" src="http://l-stat.livejournal.net/img/userinfo.gif?v=17080?v=124.6" /></a><a href="http://elisem.livejournal.com/" class="i-ljuser-username" target="_self" ><b>elisem</b></a></span>'s table. Please feel free to stop by, say hello, and/or get me to sign books. WHICH I WILL BE HAPPY--NAY, DELIGHTED!--TO DO.<br /><br />BONUS MYSTERY OBJECT: I have no idea what this is. It was moving against the current, so I'm guessing it's alive, but educated guesses and wild speculations are all welcome. (And, yes, I am the world's worst (possibly)wildlife photographer.<br /><img src="http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/truepenny/818252/65984/65984_300.jpg" alt="BMO1" title="BMO1"><br /><br /><img src="http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/truepenny/818252/66287/66287_300.jpg" alt="BMO2" title="BMO2"><br /><br /><img src="http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/truepenny/818252/66378/66378_300.jpg" alt="BMO3" title="BMO3"><br /><br />I mean, yes, turtle, if it <em>is</em> alive. But a kind of peculiar looking turtle if so.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878910.htmlif you lived here you'd be home by nowshameless self-promotionwisconpublic22http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878659.htmlMon, 19 May 2014 17:36:10 GMTFinal guest posthttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/878659.html
The <a href="http://bibliosanctum.blogspot.com/2014/05/guest-post-intrigues-of-untheileneise.html">last of my guest posts</a> is live at Bibliosanctum, on the court intrigues of the elves and the goblisn.<br /><br />ICYMI, the master list of all the guest posts and interviews I did for <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> is <a href="http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878479.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Also, thank you to everyone who invited me to write something for them!http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878659.htmlshameless self-promotionkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic0http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878479.htmlThu, 15 May 2014 17:56:07 GMTGuest Post Round-Up: The Final Chapterhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/878479.html
Thank you to everyone who invited me to write something for them!<br /><br />Barring other invitations, I've finished doing interviews and posts for <em>The Goblin Emperor</em>. This post is to get all the links in one place, for my benefit primarily, but also for anybody else who's trying to find something.<br /><ul><br /><li><a href="http://www.betweendandr.com/2014/04/23/interview-with-katherine-addison/">Between Dreams and Reality interview</a><br /><li><a href="http://bibliosanctum.blogspot.com/2014/05/guest-post-intrigues-of-untheileneise.html">Bibliosanctum post on court intrigue in <em>The Goblin Emperor</em></a><br /><li><a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/04/01/the-big-idea-katherine-addison/">The Big Idea post on fantasy and technology</a> (on <a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/">John Scalzi's blog</a>)<br /><li><a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/author-katherine-addison-interview-and-book-contest/">Bitten by Books interivew and chat</a><br /><li><a href="http://thebookplank.blogspot.com/2014/04/author-interview-with-sarah-monette.html">The Book Plank interview</a><br /><li><a href="http://bookshelfbombshells.com/guest-post-genre-expectations-and-how-to-thwart-them-by-katherine-addison/">Bookshelf Bombshells post on thwarting genre conventions</a><br /><li><a href="http://thebooksmugglers.com/2014/04/sff-in-conversation-katherine-addison-on-the-goblin-emperor-and-grimdark.html">The Booksmugglers post on grimdark</a><br /><li><a href="http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2014/04/better-worlds-worlds-gone-wrong-katherine-addison/">A Dribble of Ink post on hope in fantasy</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dungeoncrawlersradio/2014/04/11/katherine-addison-interview">Dungeon Crawlers Radio interview</a> (podcast)<br /><li><a href="http://www.fantasybookcafe.com/2014/04/women-in-sff-month-katherine-addison/">Fantasy Cafe's Women in SFF Month post on women in Tolkien</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.forcesofgeek.com/2014/04/guest-post-word-building-by-katherine.html">Forces of Geek post on inventing languages</a><br /><li><a href="http://functionalnerds.com/2014/05/episode-190-with-katherine-addison-sarah-monette/">Functional Nerds, episode 190</a> (podcast)<br /><li><a href="http://intellectusspeculativus.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/guest-post-worldbuilding-by-sarah-monettekatherine-addison/">Intellectus Speculativus (formerly Daniel Libris) post on worldbuilding</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.marissalingen.com/blog/?p=405">Q&A on Marissa Lingen's blog</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.mybookishways.com/2014/04/interview-giveaway-katherine-addison-author-of-the-goblin-emperor.html">My Bookish Ways interview</a><br /><li><a href="http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit-katherine-addison-talks-about-the-goblin-emperor/">My Favorite Bit</a> (on <a href="http://maryrobinettekowal.com/">Mary Robinette Kowal's site</a>)<br /><li><a href="http://nomoregrumpybookseller.blogspot.com/2014/04/guest-post-by-katherine-addison.html">No More Grumpy Bookseller post on <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> and Elizabeth I</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/03/the-pop-quiz-at-the-end-of-the-universe-katherine-addison">The Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe</a><br /><li><a href="http://read.rifflebooks.com/list/133435">Riffle Q&A</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/04/guest-post-katherine-addison-author-of-the-goblin-emperor-on-breaking-down-the-walls-of-fantasy/">SF Signal post on <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> and genre conventions</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/05/guest-post-special-needs-in-strange-worlds-sarah-monette-on-albinism/">SF Signal: Special Needs in Strange Worlds post on albinism</a><br /><li><a href="http://speculativebookreview.blogspot.com/2014/04/guest-post-by-author-katherine-addison.html">Speculative Book Review post on <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> and the Wars of the Roses</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/04/the-delicate-balance-of-world-building-scott-lynchs-red-seas-under-red-skies">That Was Awesome</a> about the awesomeness of <a href="http://www.scottlynch.us/">Scott Lynch</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/03/the-emperor-and-the-scullery-boy-quests-and-coming-of-age-stories">Tor-dot-com post on quests and bildungsromans</a><br /><li><a href="http://torforgeblog.com/2014/04/07/rules-vs-guidelines-in-fantasy/">Tor/Forge Blog post on the reification of conventions in fantasy</a><br /></ul><br />I believe that's the lot.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878479.htmlmetashameless self-promotionkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic2http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878161.htmlTue, 06 May 2014 17:10:49 GMTBitten By Books event is LIVE!http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878161.html
<a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/author-katherine-addison-interview-and-book-contest-live-here/">Come ask me questions & enter the giveaway for the book!</a>http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878161.htmlshameless self-promotionkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic1http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878007.htmlTue, 06 May 2014 12:58:28 GMTBItten By Books event starting TODAY at noon CDThttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/878007.html
Just a quick reminder that the <a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/">Bitten by Books chat/AMA event</a> avec moi (as Miss Piggy would say) is today, starting at noon CDT. If you <a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/author-katherine-addison-interview-and-book-contest-56-rsvp-here/">RSVP</a>, you get 25 entries in the giveaway contest: 5 copies of <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> up for grabs. (As I'm writing this at 7:57 a.m. CST, Bitten by Books' site seems to be down. Hopefully, this is a transitory problem.)<br /><br />Please drop by the chat. I would love to see you all there!http://truepenny.livejournal.com/878007.htmlshameless self-promotionkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic0http://truepenny.livejournal.com/877525.htmlSun, 04 May 2014 15:59:54 GMTAnother round-up of guest posts & so onhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/877525.html
<em>The Goblin Emperor</em> has gone back for a second printing!<br /><br />On MAY SIXTH I am doing an AMA-type event at <a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/">Bitten by Books</a>. We kick off at noon CST and I would love to see you there! <strong>ETA:</strong> if you <a href="http://bittenbybooks.com/author-katherine-addison-interview-and-book-contest-56-rsvp-here/">RSVP here</a> you get 25 entries in the giveaway contest (5 copies of <em>The Goblin Emperor</em> to give away!) when you show up for the event.<br /><br />I've done guest posts at:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/04/guest-post-katherine-addison-author-of-the-goblin-emperor-on-breaking-down-the-walls-of-fantasy/">SF Signal</a> (genre conventions in fantasy)<br /><li><a href="http://thebooksmugglers.com/2014/04/sff-in-conversation-katherine-addison-on-the-goblin-emperor-and-grimdark.html">The Booksmugglers</a> (grimdark)<br /><li><a href="http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2014/04/better-worlds-worlds-gone-wrong-katherine-addison/">A Dribble of Ink</a> (hope in fantasy)<br /><li><a href="http://www.fantasybookcafe.com/2014/04/women-in-sff-month-katherine-addison/">Fantasy Cafe</a> (women in Tolkien)</ul><br /><br />And interviews with:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dungeoncrawlersradio/2014/04/11/katherine-addison-interview">Dungeon Crawlers Radio</a><br /><li><a href="http://thebookplank.blogspot.com/2014/04/author-interview-with-sarah-monette.html">The Book Plank</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.betweendandr.com/2014/04/23/interview-with-katherine-addison/">Between Dreams and Reality</a><br /><li><a href="http://www.mybookishways.com/2014/04/interview-giveaway-katherine-addison-author-of-the-goblin-emperor.html">My Bookish Ways</a></ul><br /><br />I will have at least four more guest posts and a podcast interview appearing like daffodils in the month of May.<br /><br />And just a reminder, because seriously this cannot be said enough times, to help the career of ANY WRITER YOU LOVE, <a href="http://truepenny.livejournal.com/865424.html">Buy, Read, Talk</a>.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/877525.htmlshameless self-promotionkatherine addisongoblin emperorpublic9http://truepenny.livejournal.com/877097.htmlSun, 04 May 2014 15:59:05 GMTUBC: Maccabee, Oates, Oneyhttp://truepenny.livejournal.com/877097.html
Maccabee, Paul. <u>John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936</u>. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995.<br />Oates, Jonathan. <u>Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London</u>. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Books-Pen and Sword Books, 2007.<br />Oney, Steve. <u>And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank</u>. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.<br /><hr /> <br />One of these things is not like the others.<br /><br /><br />The Maccabee and the Oates are similar in a number of ways: both are true crime books organized by place rather than time or person; both are well researched (the Maccabee in particular is <em>exhaustively</em> researched, and I admire him deeply for it); and both are, for all their excellent research, very poorly written. Neither of them has any feel for how to organize their facts into something either compelling or, frequently, comprehensible. My favorite is this passage from Oates: "There was certainly much to show that the boy had been deprived of food. This was due to the fact that the lungs were severely inflamed and cut to pieces." Maccabee has sentences just as bad.<br /><br />I recommend the Maccabee, certainly, if you are interested in the history of St. Paul, because it <em>is</em> impeccably researched and it is full of fascinating details. It also does give a vivid sense of how wide and deep corruption ran in St. Paul during Prohibition and how vital an effect that had on the careers of Prohibition-era gangsters.<br /><br />If you're interested, as I am, in the crimes of Victorian London that nobody writes about (like the Thames Torso murders, for instance), I will recommend Oates, because he <em>does</em> write about crimes that otherwise, at best, get a glancing mention from Ripperologists. But, given how poorly it's written, it is definitely a book for the fanatic.<br /><br />The Oney is a completely different ball of fish. For one, it is an excellent book, extremely well-written along with being well-researched. For another, it is about a single disaster bookended by two catastrophes, the dreadful murder of Mary Phagan in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in 1913 and the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta in 1915.<br /><br />As Oney says, at this point, we are probably never going to be able to determine whether Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan or not. I tend to lean toward "not" (and I think Oney leans with me), but there are just enough discrepancies and doubts that I'm not sure. On the other hand, we <em>can</em> be sure that he should never have been convicted of her murder, because there was <em>more</em> than enough evidence for reasonable doubt, and he as sure as sin shouldn't have been lynched for it. The course of the trial, the petty, self-interested politicking of the state prosecutor and the corrupt Atlanta police, the demagoguery of a gentleman named Tom Watson, and the cold-blooded lynching (Frank wasn't just lynched, he was broken out of/kidnapped from the state prison farm in Milledgeville and driven 118 miles to Marietta and <em>then</em> lynched), and the aftermath, which proves with sickening exactitude how the good ol' boy network worked (two members of the grand jury who determined that, no, they had no hope of discovering who lynched Frank had been <em>in the lynching party and EVERYBODY KNEW IT</em>) are just horrifying. And the good faith efforts to figure out the truth of Mary Phagan's murder were a dismal failure. The bad go unpunished and the good go unrewarded.<br /><br />As I so often say in reviewing true-crime books, I wish that Oney had gone ahead and pulled back for the meta chapter, a careful review of the evidence, what we actually know, what we can responsibly conjecture, and which theories of the crime we can prove to be incorrect. Excluding notes and index, this is a 649 page book, and by the end of it, I could really have used a clear summation of what had <em>happened</em>. But that's a fundamentally minor complaint in a book that is an excellent, careful, impartial-as-possible piece of history. (When someone's viciously, virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric is (a) in large part responsible for the (1) conviction and (2) lynching of a very possibly innocent man, and (b) in large part responsible for the revival of the KKK, and that someone is thrilled by and proud of both these things, it's a little difficult to remain impartial about him, Tom Watson I am looking at you.) It is not a <em>pleasant</em> read, but it is compelling, and I do recommend it if you can bear its subject matter.http://truepenny.livejournal.com/877097.htmlatlanta 1913marietta 1915have you met my species?unread book challengepublic3